'Rust and Bone': Belgian actor had to figure out how to make a nasty character acceptable

Matthias Schoenaerts' character in "Rust and Bone" is violent and selfish.

Matthias Schoenaerts had a tricky job in his breakthrough movie, "Rust and Bone": making audiences like a violent, selfish character.

Actually, the first tricky job is figuring out how to pronounce the Belgian actor's name. He is cagey about it because it apparently sounds very different in Flemish and in the commonly accepted English version, but a close approximation might be "Ma-TEE-us SCONE-arts."

However it's pronounced, it's a name you are going to hear a lot. Schoenaerts had a minor arthouse hit a couple of years ago with "Bullhead" and drew raves at this year's Cannes Film Festival in the French "Rust and Bone," which opens here Friday, Dec. 21.

Schoenaerts with Marion Cotillard

As a result of that acclaim, the guy dubbed "the sexiest man in Antwerp" reluctantly admits he has met with a lot of big-name Hollywood directors, including Michael Mann ("Heat," "Miami Vice"), about starring in their next projects.

"It's a whole universe opening up to me, and if I get to work with any of these people, I'll be very grateful," says Schoenaerts. (He'll have a leg up on the last big thing from the Continent, Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin, because, unlike Dujardin, Schoenaerts speaks flawless English.)

But first, there is "Rust and Bone" and the tricky character he plays, a drifter who falls into both a career as a street fighter and an on-and-off affair with a vulnerable woman, played by another French Oscar-winner, Marion Cotillard.

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"When I read the script, I thought, 'How can I portray him in a way that audiences will understand him, even if they don't necessarily like him?' " Schoenaerts asks. "That was the most challenging part, figuring out how to balance between him being repulsive and being attractive -- and I don't mean in a physical way but in an emotional one."

The process, says Schoenaerts, was like putting together a puzzle -- finding the pieces that would reveal the tender parts of his character: his relationship with his son, his love of music, his (occasional) kindness to Cotillard.

The actress was busy with "The Dark Knight Rises" up until the start of shooting "Rust and Bone," which distressed the film's director, Jacques Audiard ("A Prophet"). But that worked in Schoenaerts' favor because it meant Audiard had lots of time for his lead actor.

"We imagined lots of different scenarios he might be put in and finally felt like we understood that he's a character whose responses are hard to predict," Schoenaerts says. "You never know what he will do, which is what makes the move surprising but, I think, not far-fetched."

If Cotillard's character in "Rust and Bone" seems a little more closed-off and mysterious than Schoenaerts', it's because she had little time to rehearse with Audiard. Says Schoenaerts: "He was disturbed by that at first because he wants to have a familiarity with his actors and they really didn't know each other well. But he decided to make that a virtue, rather than a problem. Everything she did surprised us and seemed authentic."

A big fan of Audiard since he was a student at a Belgian acting school (Audiard's other films include "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" and "Read My Lips"), Schoenaerts refers to him as his "dream director." But he said working with Cotillard wasn't bad, either.

"It's not like we were cracking jokes all the time, but we were diving into this universe, getting there together, and that was great," Schoenaerts says. "It was a really intense and generous collaboration."

If he gets some of those Hollywood roles he has been meeting about, they may not be as weighty as "Rust and Bone," given that foreign actors tend to get cast as the bad guys in action movies. But Schoenaerts says he's ready to sink his teeth into trying to foil Daniel Craig, Brad Pitt or Anne Hathaway.

"Actually, the things that have been offered so far have been an enormous variety of characters," Schoenaerts says. "But if they offer me a lot of bad guys, why not? The bad guys usually have a lot more fun."